Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Boot takes too long

I haven't timed it, but Windows takes forever to boot up. When I used to run Linux, I had tweaked my system to not start unused services like sshd, nfs, rpc, and so on. My Linux system always booted very quickly, from a cold boot to login prompt. But on Windows, it takes a very long time. And Windows isn't done once I get the login prompt - launching Firefox takes a while, too. Since I use the web browser for my work email, that's a long wait before I can start work in the morning.

My wife still runs a Linux laptop at home, and when I upgraded her system to Fedora 10, I opted not to remove the extra services from the boot process. This was mostly because I was being lazy, but partially because I wanted to see how quickly a "vanilla" Fedora 10 system would boot. Her laptop is about 2 years older than the Windows laptop I'm running, and hers boots in far less time.

I think I'll have to run a side-by-side test to compare how long it takes my wife's old laptop and my newer Windows laptop to boot, login, run Firefox, and bring up a web page. It should be very interesting. I'll post the results here.

My windows installation boots faster than my linux one. Then again, I bothered to disabled all the processes & startup services that it didn't need. Why don't you try doing this? You already did it for your old linux distro.

1. I wouldn't expect a newbie Linux user to be able to modify startup processes, so why should anyone expect this newbie Windows user to disable startup services on Windows? I honestly don't know how to turn off these services under Windows. A general user shouldn't be expected to know how to do that, anyway.

2. I'm using a work-provided laptop, and they have it running in a pretty much default mode. It's also locked down so I can't change any of the system settings, such as disabling startup processes. So I couldn't do it, even if I knew how.

About Me

I've been a Linux user since 1993, and since 2002 I've been fortunate enough to run Linux full-time at work. But, I've been asked to move back to Windows, at least for work. The difference between Windows and Linux has been shocking, to say the least. Since I find it interesting when long-time Windows users experiment with Linux for the first time, I thought it might be equally interesting for this long-time Linux user to blog about my first experience running Windows in over 6 or 7 years.